Poe's Quarrel with Boston Writers

Edgar Allan Poe
"Letter to B– &ndash"
Southern Literary Messenger, July 1836
[Full text]

In this early statement of his critical philosophy, Poe insists that poets can be the best critics of poetry and that American authors suffer from the preference given by their countrymen to books imported from "London, Paris, or Genoa." Beyond this, by arguing that "a poem [has] for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth," Poe rejects an idea he will come to associate with Boston literary culture and writers: that literature should be instructive and morally uplifting.

Boston Public Library, Research Library Collection